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Kafe Betawi is a well known chain restaurant in Jakarta that located mostly at shopping malls. The restaurant offer allot of wonderful traditional or local cuisines, including drinks and desserts.

Betawi means a group of people who lived in and around old Jakarta which was called Batavia back in the 17th century. Since Batavia is a port city, it became a cultural melting pot for local ethnics such as Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Bugis, etc with foreign ethnics like Chinese, Arab, Indian, Dutch and Portuguese.

“Lontong Cap Gomeh” is an Indo-Chinese cuisine that has become an Indonesian traditional dish. It’s a light chicken curry with lontong (compressed rice cake), eggs, crackers, long beans and many more secret ingredients. Actually this is a combination of traditional dishes called Opor Ayamand Sayur Lodeh which both dishes have the same style of cooking which is soaked in light curry soup. This dish was created for a Chinese festival called Cap Go Meh and I guess all the good stuff was mixed together for such celebration.

The taste of this dish was excellent, I can taste all the main ingredients and the light curry soup add the creamy taste of the proteins. A bit of warning for those who can’t handle hot spices: prepare a grass or two of icy drinks but it’s not that bad. Well if you ask the waiter they will tell you that the curry is not hot or just a little hot but I guess everybody has a different level of hot/spicy resistance. In fact I ordered this dish twice because I couldn’t get enough of it on the first serving. I would come again and try other dishes in this restaurant.